Have you ever noticed a sudden flurry of ads in your Facebook feed on a subject you recently talked about with friends—even though the conversation didn’t take place online and you didn’t search for or read online content about it? Others have noticed that, too. They wonder if their phones are eavesdropping on their conversations and sharing data with advertisers.
There is always the possibility that these ads showing up after an offline conversation with friends are just a coincidence or even that you have been shown the ads before but didn’t think anything of them. However, when the BBC asked their audience about this, a number of people shared their stories of getting ads they were convinced were served based on their private conversations.
Smart devices are always listening for “wake” words such as “Hey Siri,” so they can record your voice and execute your request. In the absence of the wake words, any data is processed only on your phone and is not transmitted. That means that third party applications on your phone (such as Facebook) would still have access to this data and could choose to use it.
Facebook has vehemently denied that they use these bits of conversation to influence ad content, but a writer for Vice.com decided to try an experiment. Twice a day for five days he said things in the presence of his phone about going back to school or needing cheap shirts for work. Then he watched Facebook for related ads. “The changes came literally overnight. Suddenly I was being told (about) mid-semester courses at various universities, and how certain brands were offering cheap clothing. A private conversation with a friend about how I’d run out of data led to an ad about cheap 20 GB data plans. And although they were all good deals, the whole thing was eye-opening and utterly terrifying.”
When CBS News ran a similar experiment, they did not find any “secret audio transmissions” and did not see ads for any of the products they discussed. A former Facebook operations manager says that collecting and analyzing a lot of voice data would be expensive and unnecessary, as the tech companies already know so much about us. Because they have so much data, they can make “uncannily accurate” guesses about what to advertise to us.
Even though we do not know with any certainty that this is happening, if the possibility that your conversations are being monitored by your smartphone concerns you, you can:
- Disable features such as Siri, Alexa, Cortana, and Ok Google to keep devices from listening for the wake phrase.
- Disable Facebook’s mic access.
